The Children of the Sky zot-3

by Vernor Steffen Vinge

  Woodcarver bobbed her heads in a smile. “All in place, and rather faster than I had thought possible.” She shrugged. “No matter. In this case, the real threat is not foreigners. I’m confident the cloaks never left the Domain.”

  “Oh, right. Flenser.”

  “You mean the reformed Flenser,” Woodcarver said archly. “Reformed or not, I know Flenser has always coveted the radio cloaks. They feed his messianic urges.”

  “You could kick him off the Council.”

  “I’ve thought of taking action against him. I don’t think you realize how clever he is. For a fact, I think he’s as clever as before his four were assassinated. Tyrathect, ‘the humble school teacher,’ was well chosen. And he still has plenty of political connections on Hidden Island and to the north. He’s too subtle to catch, and too powerful to ease aside.”

  “But there’s no evidence he had anything to do with the theft.”

  “There is a certain amount of indirect evidence. Pilgrim has noticed. Scrupilo would have noticed, if he weren’t so focused on the Tropicals.… Not many thieves could have escaped your pursuit, Ravna. You showed again the remarkable usefulness of Oobii.”

  “Oh?”

  “I got the details from Scrupilo, more than he said to the Council. You used all sorts of tricks that the Tropicals could never have guessed. No one who wasn’t deeply involved with Oobii technology could have slipped past your search. Scrupilo might have managed it. Maybe I could have—after a lot of research. And then there’s Flenser, who over the years has wangled who knows what out of Oobii—and who I still suspect stole Oliphaunt.”

  Ravna opened her mouth to protest, then decided that she had already challenged Woodcarver’s paranoia too much today. In fact, whoever had stolen the Oliphaunt dataset had an oracle that in some ways was as significant as Oobii. Possession would make almost any sneaky plan feasible. And Woodcarver had absolute faith in her smartest offspring’s continuing villainy. I should be grateful, thought Ravna. Better that Woodcarver obsess about Flenser than about the New Meeting Place.

  • • •

  When Ravna came back down the hill from the New Castle, it was an hour or two before midnight. The heather was in twilight. An occasional star was visible in the southern sky; there was the orbiting hulk of the freight device that had carried the Children’s Lander here.

  The darkness and the clear sky together brought a deep chill that mostly hid during the summer. By the time Ravna reached Oobii, the breeze had picked up, driving like icy needles through her locally made sweater. The Children called such clothing “unspeakably dumb”; in any case, the fabric had no ability to average temperatures.

  The lights from Oobii’s cargo bay—the New Meeting Place—splashed warm and welcoming out upon the hillside. Ravna stood in the outer fringes of the light and looked in. Even now, there were packs and Children within. They were probably just playing games, but even so, the sight comforted her. Woodcarver would eventually love this place.

  But just now Ravna didn’t want to talk to anyone. She passed the light, continued on around the ship. Since the theft of the cloaks, local security had been a big topic at council meetings. Nevil, with Scrupilo in loud support, and Johanna soberly nodding, thought that any number of other terrible things might happen now, including smash-and-grab attacks. That sounded foolish to Ravna, but in fact, they didn’t know who they were up against. Maybe the added surveillance cams would help. Maybe they needed more guards. We’ll get all the evils of a nation state before we get the tech we need.

  In any case, nothing could go wrong so close to her ship’s watchful eyes. She stepped near the hull, and Oobii quietly opened a hatch for her. She walked inside and let the ship take her up to her rooms by the bridge. She changed out of the heavy sweater and pants, into her shipboard clothes. Just doing that reminded her again of her special perks. Very soon she must move out of these digs. That had become a personal imperative, even though she hadn’t yet spoken of it to anyone. Living outside of Oobii would slow her work, but now she realized that staying aboard might be even more destructive.

  Meantime, tonight, she had more than enough work to do, and it required all the tech that her starship bridge could provide:

  What was Flenser-Tyrathect up to? Woodcarver had such strong suspicions about the pack. In fact, Ravna knew that some minor part of those suspicions was correct. The wily (reformed) monster had indeed figured out that Woodcarver had bugged his sanctums. But the reason Ravna knew that was also the reason she knew Flenser wasn’t behind the current mysteries.

  She hunkered down in her favorite-style chair and called up Oobii’s surveillance suite—the High Beyond system that she had kept hidden from everyone.

  The Out of Band II had been designed for operations at the Bottom of the Beyond and even in the Slow Zone (where they were now marooned). But the ship had been built in the Middle Beyond, where technology tapdanced at the edge of intelligibility. Almost none of the ship’s highest functions worked Down Here. Certainly, no ship could fly faster than light Down Here. And the antigravity was slowly dying. The natural-language translators were laughably incompetent. Even where local physics allowed a phenomenon, the ship’s software was often incapable of exploiting it. That was why a lot of Oobii’s design involved Very Dumb Solutions to classic problems.

  Nevertheless, there were surprises. In the days after Pham died, after the Battle on Starship Hill, Ravna had taken inventory of what remained. Here and there amidst the wreckage, she found advanced devices that more or less still functioned. With one exception, she’d revealed these to Johanna and then to Woodcarver, and—after it was founded—to the Executive Council. Ravna had kept her mouth shut about the surveillance suite; she and the Children were trapped on a world of medieval strangers. The only other galactic on the planet was the Skroderider Greenstalk, and she was too soon gone. Oh, Greenstalk, how I miss you. The thought still popped up, for Greenstalk had been with her through all the most desperate times in space.

  So at the beginning Ravna had kept some secrets. It was now years too late to reveal this one. In the Beyond, “cameras” were more than what early tech civilizations imagined. Cameras could be a coat of paint, or critters that looked like insects, or even a bacterial infection. Delivery of the information to the observer could be even stranger, a diffuse cloud of perturbations—acoustic, visual, thermal—that took enormous processing to reconstruct.

  One such hardware system had survived Countermeasure’s surge. Even more miraculous, Oobii could still reconstruct the output. Early on, Ravna had to decide just who to target with that special surveillance. It had not been a difficult choice. The Old Flenser had created a strange culture that was both cruel and fiendishly inventive. Flenser had seemed every bit as dangerous as Woodcarver claimed.

  And so one day during the early years, Ravna had infected Flenser-Tyrathect’s members with the surveillance system. The infestation was physically harmless, and the devices could not replicate, but there were more than enough devices to cover the pack, hopefully for as long as she needed them.

  Over the years, Ravna had often wished—but never with the desperate frustration of one who has made a profound mistake—that she could infect somebody else with the surveillance system. But the “reformed” Flenser had been the greatest unknown, potentially the greatest threat, and Ravna’s camera had revealed to her that whatever strange thing Flenser-Tyrathect might be, it was not working against Woodcarver or Ravna or their plans for the Domain. That certainty had more than once brought Ravna to the verge of revealing her methods to Woodcarver. Now, after the misunderstanding about the New Meeting Place, Ravna wondered if she could ever dare tell her.

  Woodcarver’s latest suspicions about Flenser and the radio cloaks made perfect sense—if one didn’t know about Ravna’s special surveillance. The ship was constantly monitoring the Flenser data, keeping a record of the reconstructed images and watching for specified alarm conditions. Ravna had reviewed that record very caref
ully in the days immediately after the theft of the radio cloaks, and the reformed Flenser had seemed just as darkly innocent as ever. What more could she do?

  I wonder what the pack is up to right now, tonight? A frivolous thought perhaps, since “real time” views from the system were a strange and scattered thing. Nevertheless, Ravna made the request. Several seconds passed. Range was the great weakness of this system. Beyond the local area, reception became extremely ambiguous. Fortunately, Flenser had been out of the area only a few times in ten years—a very good consequence of Woodcarver’s strict hold on the fellow. The reports from the infestation were forwarded in unsynchronized driblets across the nearly random locations of devices that previously had been shed from the pack’s members. Sufficient data to build one picture might take a thousand seconds—and then less than one second for the next image.

  Sometimes important adjustments would show up later and Oobii would revise the image stream in really strange ways.

  Tonight, reception was poor, but as Oobii’s signal-processing software struggled with clues, the pictures gradually became clearer, more colorful, brighter. There were a few moments of motion and then the stream froze again. Ravna fiddled with the parameters.

  Flenser was somewhere in the sub-basements of the Old Castle. He went there two or three times a year. Several years ago, Ravna had concluded that Flenser did indeed know where Woodcarver’s spy cameras were located. That was a scary conclusion, but then she realized that most of these trips “downstairs” were just part of Flenser’s hobby of enraging his pack parent.

  There were exceptions; Flenser had some things he really didn’t want Woodcarver to know about. For instance, Woodcarver had forbidden Flenser to try to rehabilitate his creation, Steel. In that, Woodcarver had reneged on her peace treaty with Flenser. It was the only such incident Ravna knew of. The remains of Lord Steel were allowed to live, but as a slobbering, slashing threesome. The madpack had been kept in isolation, at the veterans’ fragmentarium.

  For a time, it had looked like Flenser might restart the war over Woodcarver’s broken promise. Instead, he used the issue to win a number of concessions—including repossession of the Old Castle. But Ravna knew that the wily Flenser had not given up on Steel. In the early years, Flenser had often come down to these sub-basements to meet with Carenfret, a broodkenner at the Fragmentarium. That pack was unquestionably loyal to Woodcarver, and probably opposed to every one of the Old Flenser’s horrific experiments. Flenser and Carenfret had been conspiring all right, but only to persuade Woodcarver to make Steel whole. Maybe they would have succeeded eventually. Unfortunately, Steel’s problem was a torment from within; the poor wretch had fought itself to death, rendering the conspirators’ plans moot.

  Ravna was certain that Woodcarver would not see things so forgivingly. Meeting down in the Old Castle catacombs was itself the stuff of treason. The chambers were steeped in horror. Woodcarver had once attempted an inventory of the place. Her packs had found at least five levels, with many fallen tunnels still unsurveyed.

  In recent years, the catacombs had become much too intriguing to the Children. When they got to be ten or eleven years old, they just had to take a crack at exploring “Flenser’s Caves of Death.” If you counted natural erosion and rock falls, there were plenty of entrances, a new one discovered every few years. Sooner or later, some kid was going to fall down a hole and get killed. That and the onshore cliffs had been Ravna’s biggest day-to-day worries, until this Denier cult thing.

  In tonight’s expedition, most of Flenser was carrying solar cell lamps. The light was scarcely brighter than tar torches, but it didn’t consume oxygen or make smoke. Ravna recognized the low-ceilinged cavern Flenser was passing through. Some kids had gotten lost here just last year. It was—she hoped—the most grisly place they would ever see. She remembered how it stank, even after all the years. The dark floor was punctuated with stone plugs that looked like small manhole covers. In the view Oobii synthesized from Flenser’s various heads, she could see the hexagonal pattern of dozens—hundreds—of covers stretching off into the darkness.

  The picture stream froze. Oobii was waiting for signal or—more likely—had fallen behind in its analysis. Ravna didn’t rush it. She wanted the high-resolution video, and if it took a while for the clues to dribble in and be interpreted, that was fine. In fact, this sequence seemed usable. Sometimes, no matter how long she waited, all she could get was ambiguity.

  So she stared idly at the still picture. There was a missing “manhole cover” just to the right of one picture. That was what had scared her when the kids went exploring. In the dark, you could fall into one of those open holes and break your neck. She idly merged the views from several of Flenser’s members. The synthesis gave her a view into the hole. The bottom was lost in shadow, but she knew each hole was about two meters deep, ending in a sewage sump. If Oobii was not interpolating from past experience, this particular hole was not empty.

  She could see bones and desiccated flesh. Yech. No doubt about it, Old Flenser had been a monster. These holes were a combination of dungeon and rack. Flenser—and later Steel—would split a prisoner into its component members, sticking each of them into a separate hole. There, they could be fed and watered, physically tortured or simply left to go mad in the mindless closeness. Flenser called the process “recycling,” since once the individual members went mad or catatonic, they could be reassembled into “custom-designed” packs, the parts mixed and matched with those of other prisoners. A few of the recycled packs still wandered about the Domain. Most were sad, lobotomized freaks; a few were twitchy psychopaths. Recycling was Flenser’s grisliest, stupidest achievement.

  Finally, the video stream came unstuck, and the various viewpoints moved past the ghastly hole. A tiny window by Ravna’s hand showed a diagram of how the various members were positioned and which field of view was being shown in the main display. As usual, Flenser’s crippled member was rolling along near the front. Its white-tipped ears showed at one point or another in most of the other views. White-Tips was the limiting factor in the Flenser-Tyrathect’s mobility. The critter had a crushed pelvis. It lay, swaddled in blankets, in a wheelbarrow-like contraption that the others pushed or pulled.

  In recent years, White Tips’ eyesight had fogged over. The creature was getting old, and cataract cures were decades in the future. So the White Tips’ view showed what was ahead first, but even more hazily than most of Oobii’s reconstructions. Still, there was something in the way of the pack. Ravna switched back to a synthesis from all the members. There was another pack, just at the edge of the lamplight. It was Amdi!

  Where was Jefri? Ravna looked carefully in all the windows. Nothing more could be seen in the shadows. She rolled back a few seconds, and did some pattern analysis.… No, there was no sign of Jef. She stifled the impulse to raise the humaniform probability and reanalyze.

  Amdi hunkered down as the lamplight spread across him. White Tips’ wheelbarrow was rolled forward amazingly close, and the rest of Flenser-Tyrathect spread out, forming a semi-circle around Amdiranifani.

  The video stream froze again; a diagnostic window showed that this delay was related to Flenser’s hearing. Till now, the sounds coming across the link hadn’t received much analysis. Ravna had heard the click of Flenser’s nails on the stone, the creak of the wheelbarrow, but Flenser’s mindsounds—ultrasonics from 40 up to 250kHz—were mostly ignored. Patterns that indicated startlement or anger would be reported, but constructing a detailed thought stream would have been impossible for the Oobii even in the Beyond.

  Now Oobii heard the chords and gobble-hiss of Interpack speech.

  After a moment more, video and synchronized sound continued, with Oobii’s best guess at translation appearing below the main window.

  Flenser-Tyrathect:

  You have my [time | curiosity],

  [little one | little ones].

  Why did you want this meeting?

  Amdiranifani:

&
nbsp; I [?] very sad. I [?] [?] scared.

  What [?] me [?] [?]

  Ravna replayed the audio a couple of times. By combining Oobii’s guesses with her own knowledge, she could often make sense of Tinish. Amdi’s last statement was pretty clearly: “What will become of me?”

  But now Amdi switched to Samnorsk: “Could we please speak in human, Mr. Tyrathect? It’s the language I like best. My problems are hard to say right in Tinish.”

  “Of course, my dear boy. Samnorsk will be fine.” Flenser’s human voice had its usual cordial tone, the manner of a clever sadist.

  Surely Amdi recognized the mockery in Flenser’s tone? After all, the eightsome had known Flenser-Tyrathect since the final days of the Flenserist regime. But now the eight huddled together and edged forward a few centimeters, almost crawling on their bellies. “I’m so afraid. There are so many things to be sad about. Maybe if there weren’t so many, I could cope and not just be a silly self-pitier.”

  Flenser-Tyrathect’s chuckle was gentle. “Ah. Poor Amdiranifani. You are enjoying the gift of genius. When ordinary people are confronted with multiple tragedies, the pain scarcely increases. They simply can’t feel the extra burdens. But you have a greater capacity for suffering. Even so—”

  The diagnostic window showed serious relay problems. Some of the forwarding devices were probably riding with the evening glowbugs up on the surface; maybe those insects were thinning as the night air cooled. Several seconds passed. Oobii’s guesses were not converging. Finally a little red flag appeared, indicating that clarity was unattainable with the data being received. Sigh. Ravna raised the level of acceptable uncertainty, and waved for the programs to proceed. Sometimes this surveillance reminded her too much of pre-tech fairy tales: She was a sorceress hunched over her crystal ball, doing her best to scry truth from uncertain auguries.